


Between the Pines

by northerntrash



Category: The Hobbit - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Beauty and the Beast, Alternate Universe - The Lady of the House of Love, Barduil Secret Santa, Blood, Fairy Tale Elements, Fusion, M/M, Vampires
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-20
Updated: 2015-12-20
Packaged: 2018-05-07 22:39:39
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 21,071
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5473139
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/northerntrash/pseuds/northerntrash
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He is a lost spectre, a thing of fable, and when he hears the wolves howl their melancholy chorus, announcing a presence in his forest, he rests his head in his hands, and wonders how long it will be before he is burying another pile of clothes and chipped bones in the part of his garden where once his ancestors were buried, before they ceased to live.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Between the Pines

**Author's Note:**

  * For [loyallokigirl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/loyallokigirl/gifts).



> My entry for the Barduil Secret Santa - Season's Greetings to loyallokigirl/hiddlescones! I hope you enjoy my first attempt at a vampire au.

 

There is no way out of this wood.

He came to realise that yesterday afternoon, but is only just beginning to admit it to himself now, as the slender boughs of the overarching pines join above the path, meeting and merging into a cover that no light can penetrate, that not even the breeze seems to shake. The trees grow closer to the path here than they did before, the branches low across the twisting track so that every now and again one slaps across his chest or his face when he is unable to steer his bike out of the way of them in time.

They’re hung with crystals of water, those branches, heavy with the residue of the mist that he woke to this morning that still has not dissipated, and soon enough he is shaking with cold from the soaking wool of his jumper despite how fast he is riding, how hard he is pedalling, despite the fact that it was only the first days of September, and the air had no cause to be this chill. But it had been colder ever since he had crested the top of the mountain pass, and had looked down into the valley below, surrounded by a horseshoe of mountains, steep and treacherous for all that they were beautiful. He had thought the forest handsome then, when he had first looked at the mass of misty pines unbroken but for the lazy slither of a snake of a river, that ended only when the mountain range began to lower its heights back to the plains, a far off blur in the distance that he could barely make out.

The trees had been a haze of greens and greys in the early morning sunlight, a weak and watery golden light that kissed the mists that rose from the treetops, that lit the entire place up, something magic, something strange to his young and naïve eyes, eyes that had never seen anything other than the small village he had been born in until recently, when the death of his parents and his lack of prospects had driven him to ride across the country on an old and battered bicycle, to meet a distant uncle in an even more distant town, who had written with the promise of work.

It had been the finest days of July when he had left, and already he had weathered the sweltering heat of that month, then the hot storms of the next, and before he had known it September had been upon him, and he had been running behind in his journey. That had been what had forced him to cut across this valley, in a way so infrequently travelled, despite the warnings he had received from the locals in the villages on the other side of the mountains.

“It’s not that anything ever happens,” one tavern girl had told him, as he sipped a dark and bitter ale the evening before he had set off up the pass, his old canvas tent stuffed into his pack, his bicycle pannier full of supplies, enough to last him the week and a half it would take him until he came next to another village. “It’s just that none of us ever go there, y’ken?”

He hadn’t understood, even less so when he had looked out over that valley on that first fateful morning, had seen the perfect clarity of the air. For the first moment in his life he had wished that he was an artist.

How could anyone not wish to feast their eyes on such a sight?

His first few days had gone without any real concern: the path followed the river, its water clear and bubbling, a hearty line of grass between the two that he could pitch his tent on at night. It was colder here, to be sure, but he had been warm enough after shrugging into an extra jumper when he bedded down in the old sleeping roll he had found in his father’s barn. When he had first set out on the road he had been woken more nights than he cared to remember by the plaintive calls of some distant night bird, by the screams of foxes, by the sound of the world, alive and so vibrant around him, but slowly he had adjusted, as man is wont to do, and though the noises of the wild still stirred him, after a time he found that he could roll back over and sleep again, without the fast pace of his heart keeping him wired and wide awake for long hours in the darkness.

The path had been a pleasant one to ride along: he had seen little movement from the forest, and so had not been able to use his bow to catch anything for supper, but he had his old tin hooks, and had snared a few fish from the river, grilling them up in the evening on a fire whose smoke curled upwards into a darkness that seemed to stretch impossibly far, laced with constellations that seemed so different to anything that he had seen at home, even though he knew that that couldn't be right.

He had enjoyed himself, had enjoyed the gentle quiet, the rushing of the river and the pulse of his own heartbeat. He valued his loneliness, as bitter as it tasted on his tongue whenever he thought about it, weighed down still with the strange cloak of grief that comes when you have mourned the loss of a loved one to your fullest, but have found that it is time to think on other things, not just them. He valued the nights watching the stars, the days murmuring broken songs that he could barely remember, the time spent with nothing but the next corner to think of.

But soon enough, things had begun to change.

The villagers had told him (a little unwillingly, still trying to convince him that the much longer route around the mountains would be safer) that after a few days he would come to a fork in the road, and that he should turn to the west: the east would take him on a long and meandering path that wouldn’t save him any time at all. West, however, would lead him along the foothills of the mountains, through the edges of the forest, and eventually to the foot of the mountain pass.

But… well, it hadn't gone quite like that.

He had found the fork, sure enough, and his heart had lightened when he had, knowing that his journey was nearing its end. And for that first day, at least, nothing had seemed wrong at all: the path had weaved in and out of the trees, the mountains a glaring behemoth above him, the path less sand now than rock – he’d pitched his tent under the trees that night because of that, laying down on the forest floor.

Moss had grown in the under-brush, thick and comfortable, his back padded further by a layer of fallen pine needles, and as he lay his head on the ground that night he could smell the bitter scent of them, the coolness of the earth, all tangled together with the smell of mist, and rain. But though it might have been the most comfortable ground he had lain on since he left his home, he found that he was soon woken, for all that he had thought he had grown use to the noise of the wild, woken indeed by the sound of wolves, howling some distant melancholy chorus.

He lay in the dark, ears straining, as if he could understand their song if only he listened hard enough.

He fell back asleep, minutes or maybe hours later, none the wiser.

The next morning dawned full of a thick mist that clung to Bard like a cape as soon as he slipped from underneath the heavy canvas of his tent: he could no longer see the mountain, nor even the path too far ahead of him. He was no longer sure if the wolf song he had heard in the night was real, or just the echoes of some strange, now-lost dream: he set off with an odd unease weighing him down.

That feeling had only grown the further down the path he went: the trees seemed thicker at the side of the path than they should have been, but he had been sure that he was in the right place just yesterday, and the mist, he knew, might well be obscuring the view well enough to deceive him – he was not used to such an enclosed landscape. The small village where he had been born and raised was on the water, a lake side place surrounded by miles of plains and moorland, flat and barren and beautiful in its own, subtle way: full of the fluttering movement of birds in the summer, desolate and strange in the winter, pricked with bright spots of colour from different marsh flowers in the spring.

He had never ventured beyond the villages close by until now: had spent his life helping his father in his trade, staring into the sky and wondering what else was beyond the distant and hazy horizon, dreaming and hoping, but knowing full well that he could not leave his elderly father. When the old man had passed away the year before, he had almost been afraid to go out into the unknown, and it had taken days before that discomfort had left him.

It was back with full feeling now.

But still he rode on, trusting in the road and the straightforward directions that he had been given, sure that he could not have got them wrong. He finally did pull on his spare jumper when he stopped for lunch, slightly stale bread and cured meats, an apple that was beginning to wrinkle. His food supplies were beginning to run low, but he should have only been a couple of days from the pass.

He wasn't.

The next night passed in much the same way, sleep broken by the distant racket of wolves, by the strangely hollow sound of the wind, the echo of what had sounded to him like a horse in the distance. For a moment, as he lay there in the dark, he could have sworn that he had heard a whimper, something similar to a child, but it was gone almost as soon as it came, the sound disappearing so quickly that he was uncertain whether he had imagined it or not. He didn’t get out of his tent to check: his fire had guttered and died early into the evening, and it would have been too dark to see anything – besides, a peculiarly ominous feeling had settled over him, impossible to shift. It lingered the next day, too, and the one after that, as the path continued to wind through the trees, seeming to turn further and further away from the mountains, though he still could not see them to be sure.

When he came to the village, he was willing to admit that he might be lost.

It was not a living village, but the ruins of one. There are many reasons that a village might be abandoned over time, and Bard ran them through his mind – famine, plague, sour water, poor resources, war. But he was wrong on all counts: the inhabitants had fled the area before living memory not for any of these reasons, nor for any that they had ever been able to justify before slowly the story was forgotten. Its people – what was left of them – had fled in terror, slipping away into the dark shadows between the trees without warning, too afraid of the strange presence in the forest, the mist that never seemed to shift, the darkness that had fallen over them.

They had gone into the forest, and the story had been lost. None of them had ever escaped the valley.

But Bard did not know that as he dismounted his bicycle and took careful steps through the ruins, padding in and out of long abandoned houses, the dark stains of fires still evident on the stone fireplaces. The walls had crumbled away over its long years of neglect, roofs had fallen in, and ivy and moss was slowly taking back the land that had once been taken from it, but there was a strange beauty in its desolation, in the long shadows and the way that the mist seemed to lie heavy on the moss, his legs forming ripples in its milky wisps as he walked through it.

It hadn't been on any map that he had seen, nor had anyone mentioned it to him before.

He swallowed as he rested a hand against one wall, crumbling in places, that had caught his eye with a series of stones intersected with small lines incised into them. Names had been cut next to those lines, and ages too: he felt an involuntary shiver run down his spine as his fingertips skimmed over the last relic of a family that had once lived here, of children that must once have grown and played in and around this house, this strange village, out here in the middle of nowhere.

An unprovoked fear crept into his chest, holding him vice-like: there were no birds singing here, no sound of life other than his own breathing, heavier than it had been when he had dismounted.

And all of a sudden he wanted to get on his bicycle, wanted to go back the way he came, the feeling coming upon him so strongly that he was struck as still as silent as a statue, as if rendered of marble. He wanted to leave, to get out of this damn forest, to go _home,_ to see his father again, to sleep in the bed that he had always known, to see the _sunlight_ again, to be anywhere other than here-

But his eyes turned away from the path, slowly, purposefully, though he was not certain that he was controlling his body any more.

There, on the other side of the village, was a path.

Just a narrow thing, the trees growing so close to its wandering route that their lower boughs had begun to cover it almost entirely with a shower of pine needles. He might not have noticed it at all, if he hadn't been looking for it

But… he hadn't been looking for it, not really.

Had he?

The mist seemed to be thicker now, wrapping around his ankles as if reaching for him, drawing him closer. He took a hesitant step towards the forest, those dense trees seeming to call for him for a moment, and he found himself no longer certain of what would happen if he did, where he would go, whether he would ever escape the dark spaces between the trunks that seemed to leer at him, like gaping mouths, ready to swallow him whole-

He shook his head, the moment breaking, and half-ran across the decaying village to his bicycle.

It was hours before he stopped again: he had turned his bicycle around and went back in the direction that he had come, quicker now than he had first been when he had arrived, his throat tight with nameless fear for which he had no explanation, his heartbeat loud enough that it almost drowned out the whispers that he now thought were coming from the trees, the whispers that he couldn't quite ignore, no matter how hard he tried. He had never been this afraid before: in the quiet life that he had lived he had never know a reason to understand true fear, had never felt anything that had taken him over so entirely.

The night set and he still didn't stop, even as the mist thickened around him and the cold struck his chest in a way that was entirely unnatural for this time of year. The forest was moving past him too quickly to notice if it was familiar to him or not – even if it was, the trees were all too similar, every shadow suddenly transforming into gaping mouths, every hollow suddenly possessing a terror of a quality that he could not explain, some dread that came from deep within him, some primordial and inexplicable thing, handed down from his forebears, who knew better the darkness of the world.

He rode; he was quite convinced that he would keep going, would never stop until those branches overhead broke open and he could once more see the distant stars, watching him with some good humour, wouldn't stop until he was back on the path and back near the mountains, until-

And then his bicycle hit a stone.

He was thrown over the handlebars quite suddenly, his breath exploding from his lungs as he landed face first on the ground, the smell of the dirt instantly overwhelming, the earth damp underneath his face even though it hadn't rained in weeks. His palms were scraped, there was a stinging across his abdomen that only grew worse when he breathed in, and a ringing in his ears.

He squeezed his eyes shut, wincing a little as he pulled his arms up, underneath himself, slowly pushing himself up, rolling as he went until he was sat on the cold ground.

The trees seemed to whisper above him.

Everything hurt.

A howl came from somewhere far away, echoing around the cage of the mountains, through the pines, caught on the breeze.

He took long, slow breaths, and finally looked up again.

The ruined houses were all around him, the twisting ivy barely visible in the darkness: for a moment he was certain that he must have come upon another abandoned place, but then he glanced to his side and saw the stone with the children’s heights cut into them, saw those familiar walls, saw his own footprints in the dirt, scuffed from where he had run back to his bicycle. He had ridden for hours in the opposite direction, but despite of that, he had found himself in the village again.

It was impossible, yet somehow, it was true.

He breathed: once, twice, three times.

His heartbeat, a cacophony in his ears, but somewhere out there, something else.

There was something calling him, something distant, that he couldn't quite hear.

He pulled himself to his feet, and walked across the remnants of a former people, to the path that he had seen the first time that he had been here. He did not look back, nor did he falter this time: when he came to the line of trees, gaping in front of him, he simply stepped through them, ignoring the way that the pine needles seemed to drag against him for far longer than they should.

And then Bard was gone, lost to the forest, leaving only his bicycle on the path, overturned, one wheel still spinning slower and slower, the only movement to be seen by any eyes that were watching.

A wolf howled again, closer than before.

 

* * *

 

 

The castle has stood for countless generations, looming out of the forest like some great ship, caught on land, unmovable and all the more fearsome for the fact that it does not belong. Its great towers cut through the sky, dark and unmoving, covered in shadows even in the brightest sunlight, although that rarely manages to fight its way through the heavy cloud that falls down from the mountains. The walls of its older wings are crumbling, floorboards warping under exposure to the rain and the winter frosts, the high beams of its once-great halls arching, skeletal, towards a sky made all of steel, and iron. The revenants of this castle had long ago abandoned it to the shadows that seem to creep across the stonework even when there is no light to cast them, to its strange and lifeless inhabitants, whose skin have never seen the sun and whose presences were never reflected in the great mirrors that hung in the elaborate ballrooms, now derelict, haunted by more than their lost beauty.

No human life has seen this castle for the longest time, hiding away from an awakening world behind the barrier of the pines, behind the impenetrable barrier of its legacy.

A wolf, tall and beautiful, eyes oddly human, pads from the great arched doorway, down the steps and through the overgrown gardens, disappearing into the forest.

There is only one inhabitant of this great and sprawling ruin now, just one, though once there were many. He sits in his high rooms stained with damp, behind the heavy call of dusty curtains, the kind that let no light in; he languishes in robes of faded brocade, ripped from centuries of use, once-bright colours now worn and faded, under the watchful gaze of his ancestral portraits which move within their frames, just imperceptibly, a flicker of movement caught only out of the corner of the eye.

They scream their rage at him on the nights when the moon is at her fullest, but he has been here for an age or more, and he no longer reacts, his face cool and calm, though not happy, never happy.

He has been alive for longer than even he can remember, and alone for most of that, whiling away the days of his endless existence in solitude but for the portraits and the beasts of the forest, counting out the soft-edged cards of his tarot deck onto the table, no longer curious about what they have to tell him.

He is Death, he has always been Death, but he is more than that, too, for all that he does not know this yet.

His voice is a reverberation, carrying far further than it should, somehow hollow for all of its depth, as if it would prefer to be a whisper – but there is no one here to speak to. Sometimes it sounds more like a howl than anything else, and he raises it to meet the call of his wolves in the forest, hearing their stories, their longing, and matching it with his own. He sings too with the songbirds he keeps in cages, following their fluttering call, and sometimes he weeps as he hears them ache for their freedom. He does, too.

His fair falls down like water around himself, the bright white gold of it stained with dirt and things far fouler. He hides his face behind that hair, so that no one might see what has been done to him. When glimpses of his expression show through, they are startling in their beauty, a contrast to the decay around him, a contrast to the ruin of his clothes and the blood that stains the carpet burgundy.

But his beauty a sign of his illness, of his depravity, for even with the scars it exists in too much a state of perfection to ever be human.

The castle is home to many creatures, some living and most of them not, but none dare follow him to the rooms that he keeps for himself, the ones full of furniture that he has broken himself over the years, when violent rages come upon him. The splinters dig into his bare feet, but he does not wince at the pain of them, does not even react any more. He hasn't felt their bite in centuries.

The wolves pad in and out as they will: they lick the blood from his fingers and he buries his hands in their fur, searching for the warmth of contact, desperate and longing for something other than the cold which he himself creates, despite himself. For he has no control of his condition, no way of changing it: he was born cursed in this way, and cursed he must remain, for he knows no way of escape other than the hand of a death chosen by himself – and that choice is one that many before him have taken, opening their curtains or stepping into the courtyard at high noon, turning to nothing more than ash, the kiss of death a better alternative to his mad ancestors than the pain of continuously living, never ageing, never changing.

There are scorch marks by the windows of many of the rooms. Sometimes he runs his fingers across them until they are black with it, just to feel close to his kin again. The ash has long since blown away: it never offers him comfort, just serves to remind him that he is alone. One day he knows that even these scorch marks will be gone, too.

His father died so long ago that his face is nothing but a blur to him now, long lost to memory, but he left these vast lands to him, and now he is the Lord of the endless forest, of beasts that roam it, of the shadows that haunt the ruins, a constant reminder of the crimes that they have committed, over and over and over again.

At night he leaves the castle, and sometimes the wolves rub against him as he drops to all fours and scents the air, feeling for prey. He joins the pack in their hunts, the forest a myriad of colours invisible to the living and the soulful, his feet barely touching the rotting needles and fallen branches, the wind whipping his hair away from his face, and for the briefest of moments, when he sinks his teeth into the kill, he feels as though he might be alive, the still pulsing heart of the deer or rabbit (or other things, but he tries not to think of that) allowing him to pretend, for just a second, that it is his own heartbeat that he can hear, thrumming in his ears. It is instant gratification, easing the ache of hunger than haunts his every step, but it is only temporary: soon enough he remembers that whilst he is many things, living has never been one of them.

He washes the blood from his face later with quick, angry movements, holding back from weeping, for if he let himself start, he is not convinced that he would be able to stop.

Fatigue comes upon him at the dawn: he sleeps his way through the day, waking again as the sun slips below the horizon, letting the darkness fall across the tableau of his realm. The curtains never move, kept in place by rusted nails from centuries past, for if they did, they would let the sunlight in.

His teeth are pointed from years spent gnawing bones: his fingers are tipped with something more like claws than nails, and he is the perfect fit for his role, the Lord of Darkness, of fear and death – perfect in every way but for his reluctance to fill it, for all his life he has dreamt of the sun.

Existence sustained by the life blood of animals is enough to keep him from wasting; it has been many years since the last human found his way into the lonely forest. He envies the living for their mortality: they are more beautiful for the fact that they are doomed to die. Their skin tastes of possibility as it parts beneath his teeth, in a way that he knows his never will. He fears them coming now, for all that they sate him in a way that no deer ever does – he never wishes to kill them, but his resolve weakens at the scent of their heartbeats on the breeze.

He is a lost spectre, a thing of fable, and when he hears the wolves howl their melancholy chorus, announcing a presence in his forest, he rests his head in his hands, and wonders how long it will be before he is burying another pile of clothes and chipped bones in the part of his garden where once his ancestors were buried, before they ceased to live.

 

* * *

 

Bard does not question the compulsion that leads him to the castle, only knows in some strange and distant way that he has no choice in the matter: he registers surprise when it comes into view, but at the same time it feels somehow expected, and the harsh pulse of his throat does not startle. It rises up before him without any warning, and the air around it stinks of decay: he starts as he feels something run across his boot, and when he looks down he sees a fox, its mouth red with blood, watching him through cunning amber eyes.

He steps forward.

He has seen little in his life that would prepare him for the sight of this place, so young and unaware of the world as he is. But to anyone this would have been a sight worthy of awe: even in decay the castle is beautiful, twisting towers long overgrown with ivy. The trees had suddenly parted, and the sky ahead was clear, and he stopped for a moment to stare upwards, at those constellations, none of these the ones that he had learnt as a boy. The moon was a sliver; the castle was lit with a haunting glow.

Bard takes a deep breath.

The strange smell of decay rises from the earth, foetid and sweet: a bramble snags on the wool of his jumper, pulling a thread of it loose, as he takes another step forward, despite himself.

Something butts at the back of his leg, urging him on: he looks down, only to see the fox again, and a smear of blood that the creature had left across the back of his trousers.

The great door to the castle is open, just a little, and he takes the steps quickly, his eyes drifting over the leering faces of guarding sphinxes rendered in stone at either side of the door: their eyes seem to follow him. The compulsion that had forced him this far already seemed to be fading, but despite himself he can not do anything but take another step, and then another, his feet leading him through the arching entrance and into a derelict hall beyond, where paint peels from the walls and great lingering spots of damp have left the air chill, with an uncomfortable taste of mildew.

The whole place was peculiar: he finds himself following the fox through the hall, along corridors, and he peeks into each door, spying rotting furniture, the moist mess of fungus indicating what had once been rugs, wallpaper that had peeled and fallen over the great frames, most of which, he thinks, seemed to contain gloomy oil paintings, scenes picked out in greys and browns. Had this house simply been abandoned, all of its possessions still in place? What had happened to such a grand old place that no one had cleared it, just let the roof fall in around the belongings?

He finds himself oddly reverent as he pads through the silent corridors, as if he were in some sacred place: not a place of any of the warmer deities worshipped now, but an older God, a bitter, angry God, something made of thunder and silver and shattering stone. The rooms here are dark, barely lit by the light of the moon outside, though the occasional gaping chasm in the roof does help matters.

He catches sight of a flicker of movement out of the corner of his eye: when he turns around, he cannot see anything, but the eerie feeling remains.

When he looks back on this moment now, he wonders at his own innocence, that the had not understood how much of a cage he had fallen into. He remembers that he felt scared, for sure, but not as scared as he should have been. The fox’s claws had clacked against the warped wood: his own boots had seemed strangely heavy in comparison.

His heart was a drumbeat in his ears.

There was a whisper of a voice, and he spun on his heel, stumbling slightly: he thought he saw a movement outside the great stained window at the end of the hallway, the glass crackled and warped: still the middle of the night outside, he could barely make out the colours. _A bird, just a bird,_ he told himself, despite the fact that he hadn’t seen or heard one since he had turned away from the river.

The fox nipped at his ankle and he started, staring down at it: it stared back at him with gaze that was almost judgemental. It seemed to nod his head, and Bard looked in that direction before he could help himself.

He had not seen the corridor, and now he did not understand how he could have missed it, unless some ghoulish curtain had been lifted whilst he had been distracted, exposing it to view.

The long corridor was as dark as the rest of the house, but for the small niches in the stonework, few and far between, which held small lanterns, flickering candles encased in glass of all colours. They cast almost no real light, just a hazy glow of colour that was almost startling in its intensity after staring so long at the soft grey-black-brown of the night in the forest and the ruins. Tapestries hung in rags from the walls, scraps of them nestling on the floor with dead leaves that must have blown in.

At the end of the corridor was a room, lit in the same, barely-there coloured light.

“Oh,” he said to himself, quietly.

In the room stood a man: not some ghostly inhabitant, but an actual being made of flesh and bone, and for a moment Bard felt his heart stammer, his breath catch, his chest full of a tight fear that he did not understand.

He was stood there in robes, the kind that Bard had only ever seen in illustrations, that fell to the floor in a sweeping line of burgundy, embroidered in some strange pattern in gold thread that had long since faded in colour and lustre: he looked to Bard in that moment like something from a painting, oil on canvas made into life, all smooth lines under heavy fabric, a long sweep of almost white hair that was lit with a strange cadence of colour from the lanterns. He stood side-on to Bard, his face obscured, the light casting faint and peculiar shadows across the plane of his body.

It was dark, so very dark.

It was almost impossible to believe that this creature before him was real, that this wasn't some strange dream – perhaps even now he was asleep in the forest, curled up in the roots of some tree, passed out from exhaustion, or else caught by some trickster imp in the web of his illusions.

But as he came closer, along that dark corridor, he saw that those robes were faded, stained with age, the fabric in places warn so thin that it was colourless: his hair was dark with some kind of mire at its ragged ends, and there was some palpable tension around his shoulders, some strange and disconsolate shake that Bard couldn't understand, but there was beauty in that room too, a ragged and unfamiliar beauty that he felt shake him down to the very centre of his being, to that part of himself that was still locked away by his naivety.

The man turned, his hair obscuring his features, but something seemed to startle him, as if he had seen a ghost over Bard’s shoulder: he flinched, his hand on the table jerking, sending a flurry of cards to the floor. He righted himself almost immediately, but his eyes did not turn back to Bard: they remained fixed on the table in front of him.

“What-” Bard found himself saying, before he could stop himself, before waiting to be introduced (although he did not know whom he expected to appear to adhere to such formalities).

“Welcome,” the man said, in a voice that seemed to come from everywhere except his mouth, echoing and timorous, deep but somehow vulnerable in a way that Bard did not understand, because nothing of this regal, broad-shouldered man spoke in any way of vulnerability. He ducked, his hair falling forward, to scoop up the cards on the floor.

“I saw something that… startled me,” he offered, as if in some explanation, though his voice was cold, and unkind.

Bard took a step closer, but the man indicated with a flick of his wrist a chair some way away from him. His skin was pale as it emerged from the heavy fabric of his robe, even in the low light offered by the glass lanterns: his nails were long, Bard noticed, and dark.

It disappeared back into his sleeve almost immediately.

“What was it?”

But the man did not say anything, just stared ahead of him through the curtain of his hair at the colours flickering through the glass panels of the lantern: Bard settled into the chair, only now realising that it meant that he was unable to see the face of his host (if that was indeed the right word). All he could see from this angle, behind that mask of hair, was something of his profile, the line of a nose, long and well appointed, and the hint of a jaw: nothing else.

Perhaps that was the point.

The chair was a deeper one than he had believed it to be: he sunk down into it, and the cushions seemed to embrace him.

“You have strayed into my lands.”

Bard startled, struggling to sit up straight, but the musty fabric seemed only to pull him further in, dragging him down. Suddenly it was no longer comfortable, but deeply claustrophobic: he pushed at the arms in an attempt to regain some leverage, but found himself unable to do so. His breath came quicker: the strangle prickle of fear had reappeared on the back of his neck.

“I didn’t-” he started, but the man twitched his head, a jolting and sudden gesture that seemed altogether too unnatural to Bard, and he cut himself off without meaning to, almost as soon as the man began to speak again.

“You have eaten from my rivers, and used my pathways on your… machine. You have burnt the wood from my trees.”

Bard blinked, unsure.

“How did you-”

But he simply raised a hand to silence Bard.

“Am I wrong?”

He swallowed, some nameless anxiety building in his chest.

“No, but-”

The man was speaking again, cutting over Bard once more, and it must only have been his exhaustion that stopped the dread that was building in his chest turning into hysteria.  His voice was cold, and there was something about his body that seemed eerily still, but for the slightest of a quiver around his shoulders, as if he was holding himself imperfectly in control. He stood as he spoke, seeming impossibly tall from this angle, far taller than any man had a right to be.

“There are punishments that have been meted out to those who have stolen from my family. They have been in place for hundreds of years – perhaps even thousands. These punishments are long standing.”

There was something – something _hungry_ in the man’s voice, and Bard’s throat felt suddenly like it was closing, some imperceptible terror in the air for which he had no name, though the primordial ancestry than rang through his subconscious recognised it instantly: _you are prey, and you are being hunted._

“I-” Bard began, exhaling heavily, but then the man staggered forward, a low groan of pain escaping from his mouth, and Bard was already trying to struggle from his chair, suddenly finding it easier than before, and before he knew what he was doing he had reached for the man, taking his shoulder.

“Are you alright?”

The man twitched violently under Bard’s hand, and he became quite suddenly aware that there was something infinitely frail about those broad shoulders, something light and inexplicable, as if his bones were a honeycomb lattice, like that of a bird.

“Do you want me to call for any…”

The man shook his head, and pulled his shoulder out of the grasp of Bard’s hand.

“Are you sure?”

The lord of the castle stood silently, and did not answer.

Bard was standing close enough that he should have been able to hear the other man’s ragged breathing, but he could not.

The fox in the hallway, the wolves in the wood, the spectres that lingered in the empty rooms of the great castle, even the trees themselves, all seemed to draw in a breath, a tension settling across the air.

The other man turned, finally, and from behind the long fall of his hair Bard could have sworn that he saw a hint of red flesh, and the curve of a mouth, the white glimmer of teeth.

“You will stay here, until your debt is fulfilled,” the man snapped, before sweeping from the room in a murmur of stained burgundy, his robes trailing behind him. Bard turned to see him leave, but already by the time he had, the man had disappeared into the shadowed hallway.

The exhale, when it came, was silent.

Their Lord would not feast – not tonight.

The fox returned to Bard’s side soon after, his mouth clean now, as if he had spent some time grooming himself in the brief time they had been apart. There was something about this little fox keeping himself beautiful and clean in the middle of all this foetid decay that struck Bard as oddly, hysterically amusing, finding himself grinning despite his shock, despite his fear (or indeed perhaps because of them), and he let himself be nudged to his feet and out the door. The little thing led him along twisting corridors, up and down stairs, until he was quite certain he was lost: eventually it stopped, in front of a door, and Bard reached despite himself to scratch it behind its ears.

It darted away, the sharp teeth in his mouth suddenly in evidence, and Bard felt that familiar stab of fear reappear in his chest.

The beast was wild: all beasts were.

He pushed through the door, and found before him a great, four-poster bed, hung with heavy velvet that might once have been a bright colour, but was now something closer to grey. He fell upon that bed, suddenly exhausted, and slipped into a strange, deep sleep. The last thing that he remembered thinking was that he still had not learnt the name of the strange man, who lived all alone in a crumbling ruin.

His dreams were full of mist, of reaching hands, and flowers that bloomed in grey.

 

* * *

 

 

He woke an indeterminate number of hours later, the covers pulled up so far over his face that he thought that he was suffocating in the damp, rotting stretch of them, now uncomfortable against his skin. The room was dark when he finally extracted himself from them, a faint glow of light visible from behind the curtains: he pulled the nails from the wall in his effort to pull them back, showering the floor around him with grey plaster dust, damp and cloying around his old boots, which he realised now with some dismay that he hadn’t even removed before he climbed into the bed, no doubt spoiling the sheets even further.

Outside the light was already dwindling: the faint brightness of the sun was just visible on the points of the highest pines, and the shadows of the forest were already reaching out towards the castle.

The night was drawing in – he had slept the day away.

A flicker of movement caught his eye and he glanced down, through the smeared and cracked glass, staring intently. He had seen too much movement out of the corner of his eye lately, and he was about to turn away, half convinced already that he had just imagined it, when a wolf stepped from the tree line, padding across the broken stone borders of what had once been a garden. His shoulders were narrow, its fur a tawny grey, and as it glanced to the side Bard caught a glimmer of white at its throat.

Another came, and then another, all stepping without concern from the forest. There was a strange synchronicity to their movement, as if this grim congregation had one mind shared between them, or they had practised this dance before. All were the bleak colours of autumn: greys of different shades, the rusted browns of dying leaves, the white of early frost. Their fur looked soft, to Bard, as if it would be a comfort to bury his hands in it, but the lesson that the little fox had taught him was not forgotten: their mouths were stained with a recent kill, their bodies lean with hunger. Wolves were the harbingers of death in so many of the stories that he had known in his youth, though the villagers had long since chased them from the plains of his childhood: _they come in the winter, child, they come when they are hungry._

As one, the wolves looked up, staring right at Bard.

He flinched away from the window, feet catching in the pooling fabric from the curtains that he had pulled down, snaring him, tripping him up and he stumbled, his knees hitting the back of the bed as he fell back upon it, his heart hammering in the cage of his ribs with such insistence that he felt it might burst free.

Their eyes had been amber and cold, lit with some strange phosphorescence that no living thing should have acquired.

There was something unnatural about this place, something more than just its ruination and isolation: he still had no explanation for the compulsion that had driven him to leave his bicycle on the road, nothing that could account for the voices in the trees, that the path had brought him in a full circle without once turning, the fact that not one of the villagers had mentioned this place – and someone must have known, for how can any one man survive alone, without contact, without supplies? There were no servants that he had seen to run errands, to bring food back, to farm the land – and what could grow out here, other than these desolate pines, stretching so high that they might rend the very sky?

He flung his jacket around his shoulders – that at least he had remembered to take off – and ran for the door, through the wide hallways, their once grand façade even more ruinous now the last streams of daylight pooled through the broken walls and roof to illuminate it further: he stumbled around corners, not knowing the way out but desperate to find it, searching, turning down corridors that turned out to be dead ends, tripping over the remnants of broken furniture-

And then he found it, flinging himself from the door, pulling himself up short as the eyes of the wolves turned to him: in his panic he had forgotten that they would be waiting for him, but they made no move towards him, just stared, their eyes bright in the growing dark. They were so still that they might have been carved from stone: not even the breeze rustled their fur, and they did not blink as he circled slowly around them.

Their eyes followed him, even if their heads did not move.

He only realised that he was holding his breath when the pine needles brushed against him, snagging at his clothes.

The path that he had followed here was back under his feet. Eyes still watching the silent creatures, he took a step away, and then another, walking backwards until the trees had stolen the sight of the place from him. A grey rag of a cobweb brushed against his cheek, making him jump, and with a start he began to run again, pushing through the branches. He had forgotten the debt that he owed the master, had forgotten that strange compulsion that had brought him, had forgotten everything other than fear. He would find the ruined village, would find the bicycle, and he would ride until he escaped, until he found the mountains again, until he saw the sunlight. He couldn't stay here, he wouldn't stay here, and he muttered those words under his breath in a whispered mantra without even realising as he ran, sap from the branches smearing across his hands as he fought his way through the claustrophobic wood.

The shadows would not take him today: the fierce power of his own terror forced him forward, and he ran, for far longer than he had walked, until he saw again a break in the trees in front of him, the last of the now grey light illuminating the space where the village must surely have been, and he pushed forward, the heavy litter of fallen needles hiding roots which sought to trip him-

And then he broke through, and ahead of him-

Was the castle again.

He stared, aghast.

The wolves stood there, still watching him, silent and grim as the grave.

There was no hint of humour on those canine faces: it might have been easier if there was.

_There was no way out, nowhere to go, no way to escape the labyrinthine despair of the great forest, and he was trapped, trapped, trapped-_

One wolf looked at the other; teeth were bared in some silent understanding, and then as one they moved towards him, just a little.

The flesh on the back of his neck began to crawl.

The earth seemed to still around him, the very air felt heavy, and somewhere beyond the mountains the sun must finally have finished its long descent down the sky, for the last of the light seemed suddenly to disappear.

The wolves’ eyes seemed to gleam in the sudden darkness, a light all of their own.

_They glow so they can see in the dark, child, they will always find you_

But then a sound came from the doorway, and the beasts seemed to startle: they turned as one towards the great doorway, the old wood rotten and warped, where a figure had appeared.

Bard’s intake of breath was sudden, almost painful.

He stood inhumanely tall on the steps, body all but obscured by a long cape of the darkest red, wrapped around him, hooded, his face covered in shadow. Whilst in the room yesterday the lone inhabitant of this castle had seemed vulnerable, almost afraid, today he seemed stronger, greater, and as Bard watched he pulled from the sleeve of his robe something that Bard at first thought was a mask – when he affixed it to his face and let his hand drop, Bard realised that in fact it was made of bone, not plaster.

A great skull, one that looked like a deer skull but for the size of it, bleached white with age, stared across the remnants of the garden at Bard from the deep cowl of red, red the colour of blood. It gave him the look of a plague doctor, of a demon sent from far below, of some ancient and terrible God that cared nothing for the play that man acted out on the brief stage of their lives.

Bard could taste a coppery sting on his tongue, but couldn't remember when he had bitten his lip.

The man rose a hand, and the wolves broke into movement, running towards him, curling around his leg as if they were cavorting puppies rather than carnivores. The man did not reach to pet them, did nothing other than nod at them, the skull moving up and down, a strand of his white hair falling from the red cloak.

The wolves fell silent, sitting at his feet, as if obeying some unspoken command.

_They listen to him, the man who hides his face behind a skull, who lives in a castle that you cannot escape from. They listen, and wolves obey no man._

“You owe me a debt,” he said to Bard, his voice as thin and frail as thread in the open night air. “You will not leave here until that debt is paid. I thought you understood that.”

There was some great age in that voice that made Bard wince, as if he were a child being reprimanded, and suddenly he was embarrassed, the prickle of it overwhelming his fear.

“I-” he began, but already the man was turning away, the whiteness of the great skull dissolving into black as he turned into the shadows. One wolf whimpered at his feet, a pleading sound, but his host ignored it, padding lightly across the ground towards the trees.

He did not look back at Bard as he stepped into the darkness: soon enough the flicker of red fabric, the autumn leaf fur, was gone.

Bard stood there for a long while before he retreated into the castle, finding his way back to his rooms as if in a dream, curling up under the covers and lying there, quite still, for hours.

 

* * *

 

 

He did not see the man for the rest of the night, nor the following day: in fact, it was in the middle of the next night when he finally ran into him again. He was awake purely for the disruption that he had thrown his sleep cycle into, having slept for so long his first night here: he had done nothing in the meantime to rectify this, and had rested poorly since, spending both the daylight and the night hours drifting in and out of troubled sleep, disturbed by the wind at the window, the howls in the distance, the sound of scratching from the hallway outside. He chewed at the small package of cured meats that had been in his pocket, his stomach growling, regretting the pack of food in his bicycle pannier, now entirely out of his reach.

When he did see him, it was unexpected: he had been watching the forest from the window, and the man had appeared quite suddenly, one moment absent and then next there, as if the very shadows themselves had suddenly taken human form. That long, matted hair had been pushed back, his mask in his hands, his face turned up to the starlight. The moon cast a dim and silvery light on his face, a juxtaposition of two parts: on the one side beauty, a face cut by the hand of some old and otherworldly force, skin like marble.

The other was a ruin of scars, a mass of flesh destroyed  beyond repair: it twisted across one eye, which seemed to gleam with a milky sightlessness, down his cheek and across his jaw, disappearing down his neck.

But it was not ugly, despite its ruination. There was something beautiful about it still.

Bard throat tightened at the sight, understanding a little better now why the man had turned away from him, had not shown Bard his face.

There was something dark smeared at the side of his mouth, too.

Food, his mind tried to tell him – or perhaps a smudge of wine. The rest of him – the part connected better to the primordial legacy of the generations before him – was not fooled.

There was only one thing that colour, that consistency, and that was blood.

_The man was not human._

No, Bard was not so young as to not realise that: in fact, perhaps his ignorance of the world only helped him to accept the fact quicker. The man was not human, and this place was not natural. That understanding slipped around his shoulders as easily as a fur in the depth of winter, an indeterminate feeling that he would not have been able to explain, had anyone asked.

The knowledge did not hit him with any great shock, though he had never been a superstitious man. Perhaps it was because this felt more like a dream than a reality: perhaps it was a part of the spell of this place, the strange magic that Bard felt inherently aware of, and was unable to deny. No one, no matter how rational, could have looked upon this place and not known: it was as if there was something in the very air, some ache in the stone and the earth that called out its place. It was in the bitter taste of the water that he drew from the well, the way that the trees seemed to talk to each other in a language that he could not understand: it was in the teethmarks in the meat that was left outside his door the next morning, that he ignored until the ache of hunger set in, at which point he roasted it outside the grounds in the daylight.

It was venison: he recognised the taste.

He tried not to think about the wolves that must have dragged the great chunks of it to the bedroom where he spent many of his hours.

It seemed to bestow on him a strange calm, this castle, a reluctant acceptance of his fate. After the first couple of days, when no wolves came to rip his throat out in the night, he began to feel  no great danger – perhaps that too was due to how little he knew of the world, never having come upon a person who wished him harm before. The wolves kept their careful distance after the encounter on the front step: their master did, too.

After while the nights began to blur, the passage of time having no meaning here, and soon enough he felt his naive confidence returning to him, and once more he sought out the master of the house, for he now wished to know what he might do to begin paying off his debt. Try as he might he could not find the corridor lit by lanterns again, but soon enough he encountered the man in the skull mask once more, on the steps of the great doorway. He did not mean to find him, but stumbled upon him, as if the choice to see him was not his own, but one orchestrated by the magic of the place.

How long has he been here? He finds that he cannot quite remember, but he feels like he should know the name of his strange and ungracious host.

“I did not introduce myself the other night,” he heard himself saying, when the silence grew too great for him to handle. “My name is Bard Bowman, son of Arndel.”

The man did not turn, neither did he flinch, or make any other indication that he had even heard Bard, though he somehow got the impression that the man had, and was simply choosing not to respond. In the society that Bard was used to he would expect a name in reply after admitting his own, but the man seemed to ignore him, staring out across the dark forest.

He has never caught sight of the man in the daylight, he realised now, but only from the window after the sun is set, almost always in his mask and great hooded robe. Today the hood is down, though, the long and filthy strands of his hair catching in a breeze that try as he might Bard could not feel against his own face.

“Thank you,” he tried again, more uncertain now than ever before. “For the food, I mean. I assume that it is under your orders that the wolves bring it to me.”

Silence still; Bard falters.

“Do they have names, those wolves?” he asked. “For it seems as if you have tamed them well.”

The man – though it is certain to Bard that he is not a man – turned, just a little, and the great sockets of the mask seemed to stare at him, all shadows and a restless darkness, from the depths of which seems to glimmer a pale light.

“The creatures of the forest need no names,” he answered, his voice so quiet that Bard struggled to catch it. “Just as the shadows and the darkness do not have to be named for us to know that they exist.”

“But name them still we did,” Bard replied, and the mask twitched a little, though he could tell what expression or reaction it was hiding. “Surely you too must have been named, once?”

For a long moment he feared that there would be no response, but then the man turned again, his back to Bard, and he began a sedate walk down the steps, towards the forest.

“My name is Thranduil,” he told him quietly. “I have no other name.”

He left, after that, and Bard watched him disappear among the pines, feeling an easing in his chest, from a tension that he had not even known was there. He realises only when Thranduil has disappeared that he still had not asked him what he might be doing for him, to repay the debt.

 

* * *

 

 

 

He still does not try to leave, though he forces himself to wake for at least a few hours of daylight, for all that the heavy weight of the castle seems intent on keeping him asleep until the sun sets. He wanders, instead, and finds now that he is not trying to leave that the forest is not so threatening.

Certainly it is still a dark and dense place, and he feels that the wolves never go far away from him, as if watching his movements – he sees the flicker of their fur between the pines at times, and hears the quiet panting of their breath, discernible enough that at times he is sure that they are right behind him, though whenever he turns he sees nothing at all. The trees still seem to whisper, but they part ways to let him wander, though he finds that he can never quite discover the right way back to the abandoned village. Instead his wanderings take him to other places, ones that he does not understand: an old shrine, all stone and old bone and the waxy remains of candles, the legacy of a God that he has never met; a clearing that must once have been burnt, if the ashy ground and blackened tree stumps are any indication; the ruins of a herb garden, remnants of rosemary combining with the ash still on his boots to give the place a strangely funeral smell, all incense and death. He stumbles back to the castle in the dark most days, the sun always seeming to set earlier than it should, but he is never lost: any route that he takes leads him back to the carnivorous ruins.

But nothing tries to hurt him, and though he knows that he cannot escape there seems to him to be a beauty in this decay, in all of this strangeness. The eyes of the wolves seem to him protective rather than threatening now, and as the unease in his chest begins to lessen, the forest seems to let him go further. One day he stumbles upon the banks of a river, and though for a moment he thinks it might be the same one that he fished from, it becomes very clear that it cannot be, though he had seen no other when he had looked down from the mountain pass onto the valley all those days - weeks? he isn't sure any more - before.

This one is a turgid wash, far deeper, far quicker, far more dangerous. Its waters are muddy from the forest, the rocks that jut from its surface sharp and deadly, and he stares down into its depths for a moment, wondering at where it must have come from.

He is not sure what happens next: for a moment he is standing on the bank, watching the churning, bloated river, and then it crumbles beneath him, and he is falling into those unforgiving waters. It is shockingly cold, enough to knock the air from his lungs. He is underneath the water before he can think to do anything, eyes wide open, and how could a river like this feel so very deep? His feet cannot find purchase and panic rocks through him as he realises that the surface is too far above him to reach, the bottom nowhere in sight – no river should be as deep as this. The water buffets him, and he cannot move, his limbs frozen in place – his chest is burning, the water moving him mercilessly, he cannot escape-

_Is this what death feels like?_

And then something seems to lock around the fabric of his coat, the sudden force of it rocking his body, and his face breaks the water, the air burning as he takes deep breaths. He is dragged to the shore, his eyes too blurry to focus on anything, and the grip lets him go on the muddy banks, gasping desperately for air, too confused to understand what had happened.

He breathes, and thanks any God that might be listening.

It was a wolf that saved him, he realises when he finally opens his eyes, wincing against the sting of grit and water: he looks up into the muzzle of the creature. Its teeth had locked into the arm of his coat, in shreds now – it had caught him at a low point in the bank, dragging him from the water.

He cannot feel fear at the sight of that jaw, stronger than he could have possibly imagined: he can only feel an overwhelming gratitude at his unexpected survival.

“I thought I was going to die,” he chokes out, but the wolf doesn’t reply – how could it? It only looks at him, for a long moment, before padding off into the trees again, leaving Bard alone to try and ease the shock already settling into his bones. He is a young thing, from a hard but gentle life, and he has never known the fear of almost-death, the black shadows that begin to creep across your vision, the drumbeat of a heart ready to die.

He is not alone, he realises quite suddenly, and when he looks up he sees Thranduil watching him from between the trees. He knows – though he isn’t sure how – that he has been there the whole time, watching Bard’s fall, and his rescue.

“Why didn’t you help me?” he gasps, though it isn’t accusing – the wash of relief is still too strong for him to feel any real anger at the situation.

Thranduil’s gaze flickers to the water, the roaring mass of it.

“I have never crossed the river,” he replies, his voice almost a whisper, difficult to hear over the sound of the torrent. There is some unspoken implication, something that Bard cannot explain but knows implicitly – Thranduil has not crossed the river because he _cannot_.

He disappears into the forest, leaving Bard behind, until the cold air and his wet clothes force him to stagger back to the castle. It seems to loom up quicker than ever before, almost as if it knows that he needs to return.

He strips his clothes, crawling naked beneath the old and musty covers, shivering until sleep finally takes him.

 

* * *

 

 

He wakes in the morning to find that his clothes have not dried, still a mess of damp and chill fabric on the floor: frost patterns have crept over the chest of his shirt, as if some coldness in the night had stolen upon the room. It has passed, now, the room a little warmer in the dregs of sunlight that push past the curtains, but he still shivers as he stands, wrapping himself in the blanket from the bed.

What to wear? He turns to the old armoire against the wall, the one that he has never touched before, rifling through its contents. Everything is old, and smells slightly musty, but it is dry enough. Its withered finery is still better than anything he has ever worn before, the heavy fabric clinging to him, softened velvet and dry, cracking lace. He is sure that it must look strange on him, these fine old blues and greens, the remnants of some long-ago occupant, but they are warm and they are dry, and he has been raised to make the most out of any bad occasion.

He tugs at the sleeve of the tunic he wears half-heartedly as he leaves his room, determined once more to find his host.

The corridors of the house seem to open up before him in a way that they have not before, as if in donning their rags Bard has become privy to greater secrets: he pads unfamiliar routes until the sun has set and he finds himself once more, finally, at the lantern-strewn corridor that leads, he realises now, to what must be the sitting room of his host. And there is he is, his mask set to one side, rhythmically shuffling faded cards with his hands, his fingers long and slender and quite, quite pale.

“Hello,” he says in the doorway, though he has a feeling that Thranduil must have known that he was approaching long before even he knew where he was going. The man inclines his head, slowly, and Bard pads closer, taking a chair that has now been positioned on the other side of the table.

He reaches out, and Bard startles, but Thranduil is only pushing a carafe towards him, one filled with the clear but slightly brackish water from the well in the yard, whose taste Bard has become quite familiar with.

He pours himself a glass, and watches the cards.

“I hope you don’t mind,” he says, cautiously, after a few minutes of silence. “But my clothes were wet, and the nights here are cold.”

Thranduil makes a low sound, and it takes Bard a moment to realise that it was meant to be a laugh. It sounds musty, unused, and he wonders how long it has been since Thranduil last had a reason to laugh aloud.

“All that is in this house, you are welcome to,” Thranduil says, his voice little more than a whisper. “If you are to be a guest, then you are to feel welcomed, is that not right?”

Bard nods, slowly, and they lapse back into an uncomfortable silence.

He takes the time now to study his host-captor, and finds himself once more confused by the sight. The man is perfection made up of juxtapositions, all strength and weakness and beauty and death rolled into one, and he wonders, for a time, whether there is any other creature out there on this entire earth like him, or if the dawn of reason had swallowed them all, one by one, darkness taking back its creations and leaving behind a brightness that only Man, in all of their short-sighted naivety, can bear to look upon.

“What are you?” he asks, and he thinks for a moment that Thranduil must have smiled from behind the curtain of hair that still obscures most of his features. He pulls a card from the deck that he is shuffling with languid movements. It is Death: it is always Death. The skeleton seems to smile from the card, as if knowing its owner’s wretched fate.

It is an admission, an explanation. Thranduil replaces the card and shuffles again, thoroughly: the next time he draws, it is the same card. Over and over again, the same story, the same grinning face, the same repugnant bone. There is no change in it, and he suspects, no end, either, but he has seen old women dealing these cards before, has heard them explain.

_Death is not the end, child, not necessarily: death is a change, a potentiality._

Bard finds himself smiling, although he is not sure why.

Death and nothing more, the walls seem to whisper.

“No, you’re not,” he tells Thranduil, whose hands still, the cards slipping from his grasp into his lap, falling around them both on floor, though neither of them reach to pick them up. “Nothing is as simple as that.”

 

* * *

 

 

He sleeps deeper than he ever has before the next night, and the night after that, not leaving his room again until the fox makes a sudden reappearance at his door, luring Bard out into the moonlight with insistent nips and irritable snarls. His own clothes are dry, finally, but seem coarse and unyielding against his skin, and he shifts uncomfortably until he catches sight of the moon through the doorway bloated but not full, not yet.

It has a strange orange glow about it, and he eyes it uncertainly, but the fox nudges the back of his knees until he walks down the steps.

The light is bright tonight, and as he turns back to the castle behind him he realises that there is a beauty in it that he could not have imagined when he first came stumbling towards it, full of fear and horror.

It is decaying, unloved, its presence foreboding and somehow ancient, strangely sacred, an undecipherable mystery.

But much like its master, there is something about it that Bard cannot tear his eyes away from.

The fox nudges him again, but he defers from going into the wood, studying the sky ahead, instead.

He has had enough of adventuring for now: the river has left him uncertain, and perhaps a little afraid once more. The creatures’ amber eyes seem to mock him for a moment as they flash, but then it turns away, disappearing into the night, as if it was content enough in having gotten Bard to leave the crumbling ruins.

A movement catches his eye: he glances up at the castle windows, most but not all of them covered in heavy fabric, but he sees nothing, sees no sign of his absent host.

For a moment his heart aches, but he does not know what that means.

 

* * *

 

 

He settles into a strange sort of routine, after that. He wanders, and he eats, and he sleeps, and at night, on occasion, he finds himself in the company of the lord of the castle, and though from time to time he asks Thranduil what he might do to pay off his debt, the Lord never gives him an answer, and slowly Bard begins to forget, too distracted by the other-worldly creature and his lands. He is a strange and distant force, one that Bard barely understands, one that seems to have no knowledge of the whims of man. He comes across Bard one day in front of a roaring fire that he had made in one of the rooms with a chimney that had still seemed unblocked, a great cauldron discovered overturned and covered with dust now cleaned and full of water suspended above the flames.

“What is this?” Thranduil asks, staring at the great tub sat in front of the hearth, and Bard blinks, uncertain.

“A bath,” he tells him. “It has been an age since I washed last. And I don’t think my dip in the river quite counts.”

He had come across the tub downstairs, and had lugged the great copper thing up along with the bucket: his back aches from hauling water from the well, but now it is almost full, and steaming, and his tips the last cauldron full of water in as Thranduil stares, filling it up again with the cold well-water in the last bucket that he had drawn, suspending it once more above the fire.

His already small smile dims somewhat in the face of Thranduil’s silence, the only reply that he seems likely to get.

“I didn't think you’d mind.”

Still, no response is forthcoming, and so Bard simply shrugs, and dips a hand in the water: it is not quite as hot as he might like, but certainly far warmer than anything he has known in the longest of time: he spares a glance behind him, before shrugging out of his clothes. He had never learnt to feel shame in his nakedness: every summer they would swim bare in the great lake that his village embraces, the water slick and cool. This water, of course, is not, and it stings as it finds its way through layers of sweat and dirt to scratches that he hadn't noticed, to muscles desperately in need of relaxation. It is with a sigh that he settles back in the water, running his hands over his chest lightly, to dislodge dirt that feels as if it is has been caked on to him forever.

Thranduil is still watching him, he realises as he opens his eyes, from behind his hair. His head twitches, that strange and sudden movement, and Bard looks back down at the long line of his body beneath the water, starting to scrub with his hands, not having anything better to use.

“I could do with soap,” he says, with a sigh. “But I have a feeling that you don’t have anything of that sort around here, do you?”

Thranduil does not reply, still watching him carefully, but his head moves again, just a little, and a wolf pads through the door, a bundle of muslin in its teeth. It comes to sit close to the tub, and Bard reaches for the package, but the creature starts away from the water dripping from his hands with a whine.

A bar of soap lies within, dry and cracked with age; a blunt and rusted razor; a pot of fine and chalky powder whose use he does not know. Where such secret gifts have come from he does not ask, dropping all of it to the floor but the soap, which he hastily applies to his own body. It is harsh against his skin at first, and unyielding, but that just aids in getting the dirt off: by the time that it has softened enough to work up a lather, he is clean enough for it to have a decent effect. He uses it on his hair, first, relishing in the sensation as he rubs it into his scalp, and he ducks his head beneath the water to rinse it out.

When he rises once more from beneath the bathwater, he sees that both Thranduil and the wolf have moved a little closer, as if unconvinced that they would not need to rescue him from drowning once more.

“It is quite safe,” he promises them, the corner of his mouth curling up into a smile, though he does not quite know why. “I promise. I can draw one for you, if you like.”

Thranduil shakes his head, the most violent and sudden action that Bard has ever seen him make, and he suppresses another smile, a strange and unexpected fondness rising in his chest.

“Your hair at least then,” he says, and it comes out as a whisper, without him quite knowing why. “Let me wash your hair.”

The water is already cooling, beginning to get a little uncomfortable, and so Bard slips from the bath soon after, wrapping himself in old brocade, heavy and warm from where it had been resting close to the fire, rubbing himself down as much as he was able, and slipping his feet into his old boots to save them from the chill - he imagines he must look a little ridiculous, all faded finery and workman's boots and too long hair, but Thranduil just watches him, in that quiet, predatory way, and does not laugh. He is not sure if Thranduil will come when he ushers him closer, as if the man is some great and wild creature unused to man, but after a moment of stillness that Bard is beginning to understand as hesitation he does so, sitting down on the chair that Bard proffers.

He uses his own bathwater first, dirty as it is, on the ends of Thranduil’s hair. It is coated in matter that Bard tries very hard not to think about, thick and coarse and sticky with it, but he uses the soap and soon enough it begins to peel off, in small slivers at first, then in great pieces, dried and terrible after years. He switches to the clean water after that, dragging over his last cauldron of hot water, and Thranduil gasps as his head is tilted back, gently but persistently.

He throws a hand to cover his face when Bard smooths his hair back across his crown, so that it falls in a damp wave down the back of the chair: Bard makes no comment on this, just begins to wash his now cleaner hair, his movements as slow and gentle as he can manage.

The wolf watches them, its head on one side, his eyes narrowed.

Bard finds that the hair wrapped around his fingers is soften than he ever could have imagined: as the soap begins to strip away layers of grime that have lingered for centuries he begins to wonder if it might not have been spun from silk, as soft and smooth as it was. Thranduil shivered beneath his touch but he does not falter, not even when the creature lets out a strange and guttural sound as Bard’s fingers work across the cool skin of his scalp, still cold after the liberal use of hot water.

His hand falls from his face: his eyes are closed.

“What happened to you?” Bard asks, quietly, and his eyes follow the line of Thranduil’s throat as he swallows, imperceptibly.

“The sunlight caught my face.”

His voice is barely there, and for a moment Bard is not convinced that he has not imagined it.

“Does it hurt?”

Thranduil does not respond.

“How did it fall upon you?”

This time the master shifts in his chair, just a little, though his face is as still and emotionless as a mountainside.

“I opened the front door,” he replies, in that same, barely there voice, and Bard feels his stomach recoil in sorrow, in grief, in a hollow ache that he has no name for.

“Why didn’t you step outside?” he asks, and now he is whispering too, clean hair wrapped around his hands, his heart alive with sorrow.

“I was afraid,” came the answer, and then he was moving, pulling away with a fluid grace that Bard knows he could never hope to achieve. The long coil of hair falls from his hands and Thranduil leaves, sweeping out of the room.

Bard is cold again, he realises.

The room seems strangely empty: the wolf regards him with a strange, unforgiving gaze before it pads away.

 

* * *

 

 

The moon is full, and tonight it is red.

Thranduil has seen this cosmic occurrence before of course, in his long life, but he watches as it is slowly eclipses in the sky, no clouds to obscure his view. It is grotesque in its size tonight, seeming to loom across the sky, far closer than it normally would have been, but he supposes that even the moon must have her vanities – and why not show off such a spectacle?

The light grows dimmer, and even dimmer still. He can feel the moonlight changing against his skin, can feel it deep in his bones, haunting him in a way that time never has. Blood is calling to him: in a moment like this he feels as though he could hear the heartbeat in every creature, large and small, in the forest – and Bard’s pulse is so close that he can almost taste it, the richness of his blood on his tongue, can feel it pump slowly from Bard’s body into his mouth.

He does not want to kill Bard. This is the longest that he has spent with anyone since the last of his kin set themselves aflame in the middle of the wood, and the presence of a person within the castle has left him unsettled. Never before have the cards been dealt this way. Never before has he spared a victim.

But his presence here is a strange and exquisite torture. The draw of the cards stopped him from killing Bard on that first night, the first time he had ever managed to stop himself after coming face to face with a victim, and he had not expected the pain of it, the pain that had made him stumble, and gasp for air that he did not breathe, generational and ancient urges suddenly shut down. He had heard the paintings screaming in his head, for he is the last of them, and in his mind he hears all of their anger and rage, all the inhuman parts of themselves that had lingered even after their bodies had turned to ash.

It hurts still, and not just for the hunger, which leaves him twitching and hollow, but in his self-control he has found a reason for being, a pain that cuts through his suffering in an entirely different way,

He does not want to kill Bard, but he knows that only one of them can survive this encounter. He understands this with a certainty that he has no way of understanding or explaining – but a certainty it is. And since there is no way for him to die unless he steps into the sunlight, it will be Bard that dies.

At least in that respect they are e the same – neither of them can ever leave this place.

Inside the house, the oil paintings glance between each other, uncertain.

It seems to only take a moment before the moon is entirely visible again, bathing the courtyard in that same, bloody light - but then time has lost most of its construct to him: he has lived too long to really follow its progress any more.

But he knows that the moon has a consciousness of her own, has spoken to her himself on many nights, and so even though these strange, small occasions make little difference to him he watches the course of her eclipse none-the-less, and his mouth twitches as the red light spills back across the top of the pines. It is the blood moon, the pinnacle of the dark, and he finds that there is some strange joy to be found at the sight of it still: for all his long years he has not seen it all that often, compared to so many other of nature’s showcases.

It marks an occasion, for the moon, one which he knows that he will never understand, but he does not care to pry, for it is beautiful, and there is very little beauty in his life.

Unbidden, the image of smiling eyes appear in his mind. He blinks them away, his expression unchanging.

He does not notice that he is being watched: or at least, if he does, he gives no indication of it. He stands in the frozen courtyard, his eyes on the sky. He has forgotten the long robes that he normally wears and his skin is almost white in the light, though there is some odd translucent quality about him, as if he almost isn't there. Bard watches him from the window of his room, watches the way that his newly cleaned hair shines in the moonlight, a strange rust-gold under this peculiar moon, the likes of which Bard has never seen before.

Everything is entirely still: everything is perfectly quiet.

The only thing that Bard can hear in this moment is his heartbeat, and for whatever reason, he cannot tear eyes from the creature below him, this strange monstrous beauty that seems to be made, in this moment, of a rare and precious bloody light.

He _is_ beautiful, he knows this, but Bard realises that he is afraid for him, for this terrible creature of the dark, who lives in a great and ruined castle all alone, a monster of blood and shadows who quivers away from human touch. What will become of him, what will happen when the light of the modern world finally encroaches onto this forgotten little valley?

Who will protect the creatures of the dark, protect them in the ways that they really need, when they only know of death?

He swallows.

He doesn't want to leave this strange entity, this fearsome monster, this legend of death, to waste away the long years of his life alone.

He isn't sure what to do with that realisation.

 

* * *

 

 

He seeks out Thranduil more frequently now, and he finds him quicker and quicker most nights, although there are still some that leave him wandering the halls alone, the house feeling perceptibly empty, as if its master has left. He gives up after a while on those nights – but the ones where Thranduil is clearly here, he keeps looking.

Sometimes he comes across him in the courtyards, the rags of long dead brambles in his hands, lit by starlight: sometimes in the ruins of old halls, now crumbling, their roofs gone. Thranduil glides amongst the broken glass and rubble as if he is nothing more substantial than a slip of silk on the breeze, for all that he seems to walk bare-foot through the debris. He never cuts himself: Bard is not sure if he even can. Once he found Thranduil in a great hall, one that he had never found himself in and that he never would discover again: its roof, still fully intact, was huge, and domed, and he wondered how he had never seen it from the outside. On the inside it was painted, every inch of it, in great patterns and murals, though its heights were too dark for him to make out any details.

It had been beautiful, though, and he wonders still what it must have looked like once, long ago. Glass shards had littered the cracked marble floors from mirrors that must once have lined the room: he can picture it, lit by a thousand candles, the glow of them reflected off glass and every polished surface, full of beautiful, elegant people, spinning across the floor in dances that Bard had never been taught.

He wonders what Thranduil would have looked like then, surrounded by beauty and grace, rather than this decay. Before he had become what he had become – unless, of course, he had always been this way.

“What is this place?” he had asked Thranduil, who had been standing, hooded, in the middle of the huge hall, strangely small in such a grand space. His hands had been loose at his side, his face staring ahead, at a dais at the far end of the room, all stained in black.

“This was where it happened,” he says, although his voice is so distant that Bard is uncertain whether or not he is even speaking to him.

“Where what happened?” he asks, but Thranduil doesn't respond.

That isn't all that unusual. They speak a little, in these moments, now – or rather, Bard speaks, and asks questions, but only occasionally does Thranduil answer them. Sometimes he speaks without Bard’s prompting, though it is rare, and he tells him the stories in the stars overhead, the tale of the first night, the winter of a thousand suns. His old eyes have seen so many things, though most of them, Bard thinks, are sad. To begin with he wears his skull mask, but more and more he leaves it behind, taking it off when Bard approaches, and discarding it. He never carries it, nor returns for it as far as Bard can tell, but it always seems to return to him, as if it too is a living thing, caught in the power of its master’s influence.

But the moon wanes and waxes again before Bard finds himself in Thranduil’s rooms. He does not know why, but he suspects that there is an intimacy in letting Bard find them again that Thranduil is wary of – perhaps he pushed too far, the last time, washing Thranduil’s hair, asking for the story of his scar. When he finds that he has been let back into Thranduil’s lantern room he approaches feeling as if he has been offered a gift, one that he did not quite feel like he deserved.  

They sit side-by-side this time: when he arrived he found a chair pulled around next to Thranduil’s: the master of the castle shuffles his deck in his hands, as he seems to do so often, though his eyes have been on Bard from the moment he appeared in the open door, burning bright in the dim light. There is something feral in the depths of that strange blue, something that would be wild if it was not so perfectly controlled. Bard feels a shiver run up the back of his spine: it is only partly fear.

Thranduil does not invite him in, but he goes anyway, takes the seat beside his host, for he knows that it cannot have been drawn for anyone else. Their shoulders almost touch, and Bard is not sure whether to be relieved or the very opposite when he realises that there is just enough space between them for them not quite to be able to.

“What are the lanterns lit with?” he asks, for he has been wondering for a while.

The corner of Thranduil’s mouth twitches upwards: he is amused, Bard thinks.

“I ask them to be lit,” he replies, his voice almost a hiss in the quiet room. “And lit they become.”

It is not an answer, but Bard suspects that it is the closest thing that he will get to one, and he can’t bring himself to be annoyed.

He knows that he should be quiet, that he should keep his curiosity to himself, but he is young, and foolish, and finds that he cannot. Bard can't forget the vulnerability in the shaking shoulders that he had seen the first day that he was here, the grief that sometimes etches that strangely beautiful face, and he does not want to cause it more pain, but he cannot stop himself pushing, once more, now he finds himself back in the room where he had first come across the timeless lord of the castle.

He leans closer, unsure of what he will ask until the words are in his mouth, burning with insistence.

“Why have you not killed me?” he asks, for he knows that Thranduil could – even knows, in some deep and uncertain way, that Thranduil should, for there is a part of himself descended from prey, and he recognises a predator when he sees one, even if he does not have a name for what he is feeling. But Thranduil should have killed him, shouldn't he? He has not imagined the blood on Thranduil’s mouth, the howling from the forests that comes from no wolf – he has not created by himself the gore smeared in his hair, nor the coldness of his skin, and he is no fool.

He has not missed the bones scattered in the rose garden, the rags of lost lives caught on dried thorns.

Thranduil does not answer, but he leans closer, so that Bard would have felt his breath, if he breathed. The long wave of his hair falls over one shoulder, grazing against his hand, and he finds that his fingers wrap around it without him even really meaning to, pulling it back from that scarred face – no, burnt, he has learnt that now – so that he can see the full extent of it.

The injuries are old, as much silver as they are red. They look soft from this close, lit by dim lanterns, gleaming in the dark: he wonders if it would hurt Thranduil, if he were to reach out and touch them-

_the scars, his face, his jaw, his mouth that deals death in its kisses_

He swallows, and there is a heat in his chest that he doesn't have a name for – he is innocent in that regard, too.

Thranduil smells of blood, and stone, and the damp air beneath the pine trees: he smells of the forest, and the sky, and everything, and nothing, and Bard realises that he has leant closer still despite himself, so that his nose is now only an inch or so from the curve of Thranduil’s shoulder.

He glances up, and though Thranduil is still facing forward, unmoved, one eye stares down at him, a blue that Bard has no name for, lit by some strange and impossible magic.

“That first day then,” he asks, for Thranduil is not answering his first question: he does not move from his position, but continues to stare up at Thranduil, as if challenging him to pull away. “When I came upon you in this room – you said that something startled you. What was it?”

Thranduil blinks, and then he is looking away, down at the table in front of them: the cards are scattered across the surface still, the faces of its figures unmoving now, and his long and slender fingers move first one and then another to one side, as he searches. Finally he finds the card that he is looking for, and he brings it to his lips for a moment, pressing it to his mouth.

“I have dealt these cards every day of the long life that I have lived, yet never have I drawn this card.”

His voice is a whisper, hoarse, full of grief.

 _Only death, death, over and over again_ , it goes unspoken between them, and then he hands the card to Bard, who turns its worn back over to see the lovers, entwined together. A man and a woman, as the card always showed, naked, their limbs long and slender, tangled: vines are creeping around them, he thinks, and between their chests roses bloom, as bright as blood. Most of it has been obscured by damp, the once fine paint work warped, but the man’s face – that remained clear, thrown back in his passionate embrace, the long line of his throat elegant against the ruin of the pain. It looked-

“It… it looks like me.”

Thranduil said nothing, merely took the card back, and slid it home among its friends. Bard does not know what to do with this, with his face on a mildewed card and the coolness of skin next to him and the weight of hair in his hands, and he chews on his lower lip, unsure of what to say.

In the hallways, the eyes roll in dismay in the sockets of hundreds of painted ancestors. They can sense what Bard cannot, but what perhaps Thranduil has already realised: an end is coming, of one kind or another.

 _Lovers, lovers, lovers,_ the cards seem to cry, and all that can come to Bard’s mind right now is the sight of Thranduil’s hair, the colour of it in the blood moon light, that night he had seen him standing in the courtyard beneath the eclipse. The room seems to inhale around them, and something in Bard seems to shift, imperceptibly, though he is not certain what has changed.

_Death, always death, but perhaps this time something different._

He is too young, has seen too little of the world: he does not know that for creatures of the night one thing cannot be given without something else being taken away – love and death come hand in hand, two sides of the same coin.

Thranduil isn’t watching him any more: his eyes don’t seem to focus on anything in the room, but flit from shadow to shadow, as if he is seeing or hearing something beyond Bard’s ability to perceive. Perhaps he is listening to ghosts, his mind provides as an answer, and though he thinks the thought had come in jest he feels somehow that it might be true.

Bard watches as his eyes seem to fill, for a moment, with tears, though then the creature blinks and they are gone, as if they had never been there – he does not know what those tears had been in aid of, for what thought or fear Thranduil had almost wept.

He does not ask. He does not know how to.

Thranduil turns those strange, silver-grey eyes towards him, and they are full of regret.

In the garden, the bones of countless victims shake in their graves.

Bard’s breath catches in his throat, his chest tightening, everything feeling somehow altogether unreal, as if somewhere between the lantern light and the strange thrum of tension in the room he has stepped into another world, something altogether different from the one that he has known – although he supposes that this castle, these woods, are their own world, anyway. He has not been in the one that he has known his entire life for quite some time.

For a moment he wonders if Thranduil ever feels like this, if his breath ever catches in this way, before remembering that of course, Thranduil does not breathe.

Thranduil’s mouth opens just a little, as if he is about to say something, but he does not.

Bard thinks of the card, of the lovers entwined, of the hair in his hands, and he pulls on it, just a little: Thranduil’s head falls backwards, exposing the long line of his pale throat. There is no movement in its marble column, no pulse flickering beneath the surface, no motion of breathing. It is entirely still, and for a moment he wonders what it would taste like if he sank his teeth into it.

Neither of them move, for a long moment.

In the woods, the wolves slink between the trees, silent for once, and their eyes ever watching. The last rags of spirits hide behind the trunks, the places where their faces had once been facing the castle, tasting the air, and the change that they can sense in it.

Then Thranduil reaches for him, and for a moment he feels a strange and anticipatory fear that blossoms into disappointment when Thranduil halts his movement, recoiling, bringing clawed and dirty fingers back to his side.

When he stands Bard lets him go, as he did last time, the feeling of the hair slipping through his fingers a strangely familiar sensation.

Thranduil says nothing as he sweeps from the room: for a moment Bard sits, unsure of what he has done, before he stands to follow. As he does the sleeve of the long velvet jacket he has borrowed from the armoire sweeps across the table, knocking just a few cards from the pile that Thranduil has neatly made. He reaches to retrieve them, but the last card slips through his fingers, falling face up against the old, stained wood of the table.

It is the lovers’ card again, just as it was, but the man and woman are no longer smooth figures, but lines of bone, skeletons wrapped around each other.

The skull of the man seems to leer at him, and he replaces it quickly, before striding from the room.

In the sky, the moon shines down, bloated and nearly full once more, unconcerned at the scene playing out beneath her.

 

* * *

 

 

Things are different now. He cannot say how, or why, but he knows it, deep in his bones. Autumn has already left them, and winter is here, sunk deep into the earth, frost blossoming on the cracked planes of glass in his window every day. He has given up on the daylight hours now – there are less of them, and the somnolence of the castle seems unwilling to let him rise to see the sunlight. When he leaves the castle now it is to hear the crackle of the hoar frost beneath his feet, the star-lit nights far colder than he is used to – in his sweet summer memories of home, it was never this cold.

One night he wakes to the sight of formless faces crowded around him, all grey movement and hollow fear, but they disappear as soon as he blinks. He finds that he is not afraid when they appear again to him, some nights later – they do not seem to want anything, just to watch. Their bodies are without shape, some strange grouping of shadows, and though some reach long and blurring fingers to him, they never quite manage to reach his skin, though he can feel the chill of their death when they move that close.

The season has changed, and so too has Bard. When he goes into the woods now he feels almost at home, as if this is a place that he has always known. He has lost track of the days, the weeks, the months, but he feels as if the solstice must be close – the nights seem to grow ever longer, ever darker.

One evening he wakes to a scratching at his door: he finds the fox there, waiting for him, when he pulls on enough layers to keep the cold at bay. Its eyes seem more phosphorescent than they should have been today, and for the first time it allows him to scratch at its ears before it pads off down the corridor, leading him outside into the night.

He stands there for a moment, and listens. There is no sound, no movement, and in a strange way there is peace in the darkness tonight: the clouds are thick overhead, moving quickly across the sky, so that the moonlight appears only in patches, appearing and disappearing quickly.

 _Come to us,_ the trees seem to say, without words or movement. _Come to us._

The wolves appear from the forest as silently as they always do, their eyes fixed on Bard. But today he is not afraid: in this slow night he finds no terror in the dark. The fox darts away when they leave the tree line, though not it seems because it is afraid: rather, its task is done, and it has other things to do in the night that are of no concern of Bard’s.

The wolf eyes that light the tree line seem to welcome him in a way that he could not have imagined when first he came here, and as they turn away he moves, almost in spite of himself, following them into the trees. It is certainly dark in there: the wolves are ghosts around him, rags of movement between the stark trees, the pine needles barely making a sound beneath their insistent paws.

 _One of them,_ he hears, in the mist his breath forms in the cold air. _One of us._

Fur brushes his knuckles: his fingers skim across warm haunches for a moment, feeling the heat of the wolf, the play of its muscles. This one has a tawny muzzle, and it turns to look up at Bard for a moment, its eyes shadowed, knowing.

There is a howl from somewhere behind them: one of the pack turns its throat to the sky and replies in kind.

He feels it now, in a way that he never could have imagined. The earth beneath his feet, cold to its bones from the winter; the way that the night tastes.

Their pace picks up: Bard stumbles through the undergrowth in his attempt to keep up with their sinuous movements, and soon enough he finds his feet. There is an elegance, he thinks as he looks around him, to the way that all these creatures move together, to their unity, but then he is running, too fast to think any more.

He just runs through the dark, feeling no fear, moving with the pack, feeling for the first time in his life like something more than a singular entity: he is a part of something greater, something bigger than he is in this moment, taken with the undergrowth, branches scratching at his face, and as one wolf howls to the sky a scream rips from his own throat, tearing from him, a sound that he never would have imagined that he was able to make.

He is in harmony with the wild.

When he wakes the next day, he remembers only running: his face is scratched from branches, his hands cut, mud splattered across his entire body. There are pine needles in his hair, and when he breathes in deep he thinks that he can still taste the night, as if it has lingered in his lungs. He does not remember getting back to the castle, let alone getting into bed, but when he ventures out he finds that there is a wolf curled outside his bedroom door, not sleeping, but watching.

It seems to nod to him as it rises to his feet, before slipping away into the shadows of the castle.

 

* * *

 

The solstice comes, and for once Bard wakes just before sunset. He watches the light fade from the skyline above the pines, and wonders at the feel of it all. He doesn't know that this is the longest night, the night in which the world holds its breath, waiting for the turn of the year, but he feels that there is something different about the night. The forest seems to be active, seems to have woken, as if for just this one night all which is dead has become alive. 

He shifts, staring out the window still, as the sunlight left the sky and the shadows from the forest floor stretched ever further. He sees a light, some faint glowing thing, but the moment he looks directly at it, it disappears again. More and more appear, flickering in and out of his sight, and he wonders what lonely spirits have found themselves here, and what would happen if he tried to chase those lights through the pines.

He thinks he sees ragged faces drifting through the shadows, like the ones from his bedside.

Occasionally they seem to glance up at him, standing in his window, but he isn't sure.

Things feel strange: he feels oddly restless. He leaves his room without his normal layers, the chill not bothering him today, and he searches deliberately through the corridors, trying to find his way to the lantern room, to Thranduil – he means to ask him what is happening, why the night feels so alive, but after just a few moments he comes across a staircase that the castle has never let him find before. It is narrow, twisting, the stone long worn from centuries of footsteps, and the sight of it is unexpected enough to distract him. He pads up them quietly, his feet a low whisper against the smoothed stone.

“Hello?” he calls, as he reaches the top, finding himself in a room. There are windows on all sides, all covered up of course, and he realises that he must have found his way into one of the towers of the castle: there is another small staircase, on the far side of the room, leading up to another room. The floorboards are old and warped up here, the stone of the walls much cooler to the touch, and all around him is the debris of decades of broken furniture, splinters and broken glass scattered across the floor, a tableau of anger, of desperation. 

There is no reply, but he steps slowly towards the other staircase anyway, picking his way through the wreckage.

The steps are wooden now, and creak beneath his feet. 

Thranduil is waiting for him upstairs, in a room lined with empty birdcages. Feathers drift in the air, tiny and delicate, as if the occupants of the cages have only just been released, and Bard notes with some concern that the curtains around the window have been pulled back, and only half-heartedly replaced. 

He is preparing for an end, Bard realises, as he looks to Thranduil, who is staring at him, his face perfectly still. 

"What happened here?" he asks, and Thranduil shrugs, a graceful and oddly feline moment. 

"Rage finds me, sometimes," he says. "Or did you mean the birds?"

Bard nods, slowly, and then Thranduil smiles, and Bard sees what he has only had glimpses of before, what he has tried not to see. Thranduil's teeth are sharp, are nothing like human teeth. Sharp enough to kill. 

He had not known that Thranduil kept birds, and the confusion must have been evident on his face, for all of a sudden Thranduil's shoulders sink, a perceptible tension in him draining away, and then his eyes are alive, glowing silver-gold-blue, like a river pearl but brighter, more unreal, and Bard takes a step closer, despite himself.

"What is happening?" he asks, and Thranduil's eyes seem to flicker.

"It is the longest night," he whispers, as Bard inches closer. "The night when the creatures of the dark dance to the moon's song: the night when nothing is as it seems, and anything is possible. Look," he says, and Bard does, to the dried stem of a long dead rose, resting on the covers of an old and unused bed. It was blooming, though it looked to be dead for centuries - its flowers were grey.

Thranduil picked up the rose between his fingers - _killing fingers_ \- but Bard reaches for him too, and for a moment their hands are tangled about the rose, until Bard brings them to his mouth, pressing a kiss against Thranduil's hand, an old thorn catching the corner of his lip. 

A bright bloom in the dark room: the copper-bright scent of blood in the air. 

_Hunger, hunger, for so long I have hungered, and wondered at your taste_

Thranduil inhales, as if he can taste it. 

_Lovers and death, lovers and death_ : but neither of them knew what it felt like to die, neither of them had ever loved.

Perhaps, until now.

Then Bard was kissing him, and the killing intent rising in Thranduil's chest was distracted, just enough: Bard tastes of warmth and summer and life, and all the things that Thranduil has never known, and Bard does not flinch from the chill of his skin, does not seem to be afraid - he pushes closer, pressing their bodies together, arms wrapping around Thranduil until he can feel Bard's pulse all over his body. Thranduil’s skin is cold, so cold, and he shudders under the warmth of Bard’s hands even through his robes – it has been centuries since he last was touched by another, and never like this, never like this, with such slow tenderness and hesitation and a warmth so brilliant that Thranduil wonders if it will burn him, if Bard is the sun, come down in mortal form to trick the creature of the night, the last creature of the night, into accepting death.

If this is death it is a sweet one: if this is pain then it is one that he is willing to face. Long ago he had been too afraid to step through the door into the daylight, but he finds no hesitance within himself now.

His robes rip as Bard tries to take them off, desperate to feel skin beneath the fabric pulling at long worn seams, the fabric so old and thin that it falls apart at the slightest pressure, strands of thread trailing over his shoulder before they drop to the floor. Their movement across the room is frantic, quick: Bard pressed Thranduil against the curtains, finding them damp to the touch: the plaster of the walls crumbles beneath his fingers. Every touch is tender, slow, everything the lord of the night has never known, had never even known to miss. He surrenders, all his life the predator, and now at last the prey.

He is lost.

The press of skin undoes him, destroys him. His own hands find Bard quickly, though they quake with fear, with anticipation, with dread; Bard’s skin is rough and calloused and covered in freckles, and he longs to press his mouth against them, but all it knows how to do is feed. Instead his fingertips follow the skin, joining them up together in tactile constellations as he tastes Bard’s pulse in the warm air between them.

He hungers still, but the hunger has become something else, something more, something wild and primitive, and so far beyond his understanding. His nails are sharp, and it is difficult to remember to be gentle: he knows that if he digs them too deep, if any more blood spills, then he will no longer be able to control himself. The hunger is a gnawing ache, and he is unable to say whether or not he is going to be able to stop it-

They find the bed: Bard has no concern for the ragged covers or the damp, leery touch of the fabric – he strips off the last of his clothes and they fall down upon it together.

The hunger that Thranduil has always known does not abate, only grows as Bard’s fingers slip down his spine, as if following some invisible pattern, tracing their way downwards. Thranduil is pulled across Bard’s lap, his thighs bracketing Bard’s own, who sits upright, their chests pressed together. Thranduil starts when Bard’s hair brushes against the burns on his cheek.

The first intrusion of those fingers inside of him are met with a gasp, for all that he does not need the air.

Thranduil’s back arches: his hair falls down his back, a silken waterfall.

Time has become meaningless: the night halts its steady course, the one night of the year that it would be able to do such a thing, and waits to give its last master the time that he needs. Lights are flickering on around the world: soon enough there will be no dark places like these left, no space for the creatures of the night. If this is to be their last moon-dance, then they are willing to wait, and do it right. 

Thranduil’s skin is veined marble, softer than it looks like it would be, though no matter how much Bard touches him, he does not grow warm.

 _I love you,_ he mouths against the skin of Thranduil’s shoulder, his chest, his jaw. _I love you, you desolate, terrible creature. I love you, I trust you, I need you._

Thranduil feels the words rather than hearing them, but he does not know how to respond - and then Bard pulls him down, sinks into the heat of him, and Thranduil buries his teeth in his throat, resolve finally undone. Bard’s fingers tighten around his hips and he shifts, pushing deeper, and Thranduil begins to feed in response, pulling him closer in his own, macabre way. Bard’s blood is hot and sweet and flows down his throat with an immediate intensity feeding that desperate, clawing hunger, and Bard gasps a sound that is somewhere between joy and beautiful pain.

_It hurts, it hurts, it hurts – but it is not Bard that hurts_

They are interlocked, simultaneously inside each other, and for the first time in his life the creature of the dark is entirely whole, as if all his cursed life he has been waiting for someone to come and see past the horrors of his ancestry, the flaws of his creation, and love him all the same.

Bard rocks up, finding a pace: Thranduil’s teeth release, his head falls back. There is blood pouring down Bard’s chest now, slick and hot, and he drags his fingers through it, redolent, smearing it across Bard’s face as he pulls him in for a kiss: both their mouths are stained persimmon, but Bard does not seem to care; his pace is quickening, Thranduil’s thighs are tightening around his, and when he comes it is a sudden and desperate thing, crying out part in joy and part in shock, as Thranduil falls forward across him, licking blood from Bard's chest.

It is an act of creation, of life, of love, but as with all things, it must come with a price.

Bard presses a kiss against the marble column of Thranduil’s throat: for a moment it almost feels as if there is a pulse beating there, beneath the skin. 

Then Thranduil’s body clenches, releases, a tidal wave never felt before, emptying across Bard's stomach. Bard stills, his hands wandering, stroking, although already he is beginning to shiver at the proximity to Thranduil’s chill. His own blood is drying against his chest in patterns drawn by Thranduil's fingers, it flakes against his fingers as he reaches for Thranduil's hand.

They pull apart; outside the room portraits weep in their frames, oil smearing down their eternal cheeks.

Bard falls back, his arms wide as if to invite Thranduil closer.

Instead, Thranduil stares at his hands, in wonder.

He has always been cold, so terribly cold, but in this moment he almost feels warm.

Bard’s eyes flicker shut: the last thing he sees is Thranduil sitting there, his eyes bright and his mouth bloody, his skin so pale that it seems to shine like silver.

 

* * *

 

This is the way of life - it is undone by death.

But so too can death be undone.

This is the way of curses. 

They exist to be broken.

 

* * *

 

 

He wakes the next morning to a scrabbling sound: he sits up, and sees the fox. It had been scratching at the bed post; it cocked its head to one side, watching him for a moment, before scampering away.

The bed next to him is empty: there is light pooling in the room from a gap in the curtains. They must have dislodged them the night before, though he has no memory of this. 

Thranduil is no longer next to him. In fact, Bard can see no evidence of him at all, but for his discarded robes from the night before. There is no indentation in the pillow next to him: he doubts that he even rested his head.

He does not know where he has gone.

Outside, the forest seems to sigh.

The light is catching the burgundy stains left from his own blood, and he puts a hand to his throat. The wound has already closed: already it is just a ridge of scar tissue. He’ll bear the mark forever, he thinks.

He doesn't mind.

Everything around him feels… different, somehow. He pulls on his clothes and pads down corridors that seem lighter than before, hallways that seem suddenly bereft of the shadows that Bard has almost come to know too well. He is a little dizzy, his limbs feeling oddly loose, but it isn't an unpleasant sensation, not really. The light is bright behind the curtains, and on a sudden whim he pulls the drapery from one window, rusted nails coming easily from the plaster, as if they had just been waiting for the slightest provocation: the curtains are damp in his hands, and he drops them to the ground.

It is the first time that he has woken up to a noon-bright view in months. Outside, the sun is brilliant, the sky overhead clear. He can see the mountains: the mist has finally cleared.

He leaves the house. It feels only right to do so.

There are footprints in the dirt by the front step. He stares at them for a long moment, and wonders.

The trees part around him with ease: there are no dark shadows lingering here any more. Everything around him is bright and beautiful and full of light. Somewhere nearby, a bird sings.

It is the first time he has heard one in weeks – he looks for it, but cannot see it until it explodes from the trees, shooting straight up towards the sky.

His bicycle is exactly where he left it, among the ruins of a village that no longer holds any fear for him, for he has kissed the beast that killed its inhabitants, has tamed Death with tender touches. Ivy has grown across the wheel, and he pulls it off gently. The food in his pannier has gone bad: he tips it to the ground, and almost immediately a blue jay appears.

It regards him with one careful eye as he ties the bag back, pulls himself on to the bicycle, and sets off down the path. There are no tricks this time, no endless circles. He thinks that he sees wolf eyes hidden among the branches, but he is moving too quick to tell, and he doesn't bother turning back around to check. He does not need to say farewell to the pack: wolves have never cared for the conventions of man. They will scent his leaving, and soon enough they will know why, if they haven’t already sensed it.

Soon the path leads him back to the foothills of the mountain, and sooner still he is out of the trees, pushing himself up the steep pass: it has been weeks, and his thighs are burning within minutes, but he doesn't stop. It is a good feeling, that pain, and he closes his eyes against it for a moment.

The air is clean, and cold. Winter has arrived for the rest of the world, it seems: in the forest of perpetual fall, he missed the changing of the season.

His chest aches, but he does not weep, not yet.

He is not sure, but he hopes.

He rides on.

And then, just as he is beginning to surrender to disappointment, he sees it, and the corner of his mouth twists upwards, just a little.

There, at the top of the mountain pass, a figure standing in the sunlight, nude as an infant on the day it is born. His hair is a wave of white-gold, his face is turned towards the sun as if he has never felt it before: he stands as if he is waiting, full of the potential of life, so that he almost seems to glow from it, from the promise of a future free from constraints.

He does not turn to look at Bard: he does not need to, just as Bard does not need to see his face to know who he is.

His heart swells; somewhere behind him a wolf howls, the sound oddly weak in the daylight. It is a joyous sound, but tinged with grief; it is a farewell.

The world is ahead of them: it is theirs for the taking.

Bard almost feels like howling.


End file.
